E-commerce struggles to take off: fewer than three in 10 businesses were selling online in 2023

Brussels –Italians don’t do business through the Internet. The country ranks among EU enterprises using the Internet and online services for their businesses. In 2023, Eurostat notes, 22.9 percent of enterprises active in the EU conducted online sales, 0.1 percentage points (pp) higher than in 2022 (22.8 percent) and 6.5 pp more than in 2012 (16.4 percent). Italy is 20th out of 27, with less than one in five businesses (19.1 percent) active online.

There is a slight increase in the share of economic actors who also conduct their business online, data show (+2.8 percentage points since 2020). Italy still lags, struggling to keep up with the times and competitors, especially those in the north. Among EU countries, the percentage of firms most engaged in online sales are in Lithuania (38.9 percent), Sweden (38.1 percent) and Denmark (36.7 percent).

It is mainly large companies that exploit new technologies and an increasingly digitized world to make ends meet. In 2023, the European Statistical Office notes, 45.9 percent of large companies in the EU conducted online sales, compared with 30.2 percent of medium-sized companies (50 to 249 employees) and 20.8 percent of small companies (fewer than 50 employees). However, when it comes to large companies, Italy has higher online business and activity performance than the European average (47.7 percent), placing it somewhere in the middle (13th out of 27) between those who are increasingly making the Internet and e-commerce a business model and those who continue to struggle to focus on it. For medium-sized businesses, however, the situation changes. Barely one in four (25.5 percent, 21st out of 27) take advantage of e-commerce frontiers. While the small ones struggle even more: among Italian SMEs, less than two in ten small businesses (17.7 percent) exploit the Internet.